Hello and welcome to the COVID generation revisited from the BBC World Service with me, Ruth

Alexander. Over the next hour, I'll be catching up with school leavers and graduates we first spoke to

five years ago as they found their plans thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic.

It's worrying.

It's very difficult and frustrating.

I'm scared I'm going to be like that generation that have a little asterisk next to their name.

If you had told me that my third year would consist of me taking a poorly organized evacuation flight and then having to quarantine, I would have really told you

what is this dystopian novel that you're reading.

At that time, experts were warning these young people and their peers were trying to join

the jobs market during the longest and deepest recession in living memory.

What we're going to see here is that the disease itself impacts everybody and then

the macroeconomics are going to impact everybody. There is a very real danger that the young

person will become permanently excluded from the labour market. Right now we face a risk of lost

generation here or a lost part of the generation, that is young people who get

left behind. So, coming up to five years on, how are the COVID generation doing now? Are they lost?

Or did they manage to finish their studies? Get jobs? And what advice would they give to those who

came behind them? Today's students and school leavers, many of whom

also had their studies interrupted by lockdown after lockdown.

I do not see my friends for months or I did not even talk to them a lot. So I started to have

a lot of anxiety in terms of any sense of social functioning. When school closed, we were at home for about six months and catching up was somewhat

overwhelming.

First, it is a great pleasure to welcome into the studio, Millie Lingam.

...